Westneat: Presidential primary is marketing scheme

Last week, state lawmakers voted to hold a primary two months earlier than usual, on March 10, 2020. That means we’ll now be voting before about 30 other states. What’s more, vote-by-mail would replace the gymnasium caucuses of previous elections, which were wildly anti-democratic as they infamously drew less than 6 percent voter turnout.

All that’s the good news. But the bad is that lawmakers insisted not only that voters must first affiliate with a party in order to have their votes counted, but also that the record of which party you pick be turned over, along with your name and address, to the parties after the election.

“When you take the Republican ballot or the Democrat ballot, they put you on a list then they start to correspond with you, they send you emails, then they try to raise money from you,” Sen. Tim Sheldon, a Democrat who caucuses with Republicans, told The Seattle Times. “The taxpayers are paying for a fundraising tool for the political parties.”

It’s like a direct-mail and telemarketing scheme. Only run through the ballot you fill out on your kitchen table.

Munro said that forcing voters to first pick a party, and doing it in a way that puts those choices on a publicly available list, effectively brands voters as party members even if they don’t want to be. In our notoriously prickly, independent state, these rules alone could depress the turnout by 500,000 to 1 million voters, Munro predicted.

“I learned this the hard way, when I was running elections as secretary of state,” he said. “People here hate being told they have to sign up for a political party in order to have their vote counted. Many won’t do it. It makes this primary a form of voter suppression.”

The way the parties like it

The reason you have to pick a party before voting in the presidential primary is solely because that’s the way the party organizations like it. Years ago they sued and won, arguing they were essentially private clubs that had the right to bar nonmembers from making club decisions. As one state lawmaker, Rep. Zack Hudgins, D-Tukwila, put it Monday in defending this setup: “The Boy Scouts don’t get to pick the leader of the Girl Scouts.”

OK, but that’s not a taxpayer-financed election.

“Are we helping the political parties in this state, or the people of the state?”

That was the question pointedly asked by Rep. Chris Corry, R-Yakima. It turns out there are other states, such as Montana, that do let people vote in presidential nominating contests without later informing the parties which party ballot voters selected. On Monday, Corry tried to change our rules to protect voter privacy like those states do — a move that would have at least killed the marketing aspect to all this. His amendment was voted down.